September 17, 2018

Kodi Smit-McPhee as Keda with a Czechoslovakian wolfdog that plays Alpha
(who has a surprise for the humans)

Just to save you the trouble, I will list some things that anyone familiar with hunting large animals will object to in the movie Alpha.

And then I will tell you that this story of a boy and his wolf is worthwhile anyway.

First of all, if the village hunters were going after Pleistocene bison, they would not walk miles and miles, leaving their families behind. Everyone would go. Non-hunters could still help drive the buffalo over the cliff by flapping skins and making a commotion. Throwing spears to create a "fence" is not going to stop charging bison.

Second, according to my archaeologist friend, 20,000 years BP is too early for bows and arrows, according to current information. I would give the movie-makers a pass on that one.

Third, when winter comes, why do people keep living in a windswept snowfield in what looks like northern Labrador instead of moving to a more sheltered place that might offer some fuel?

Fourth — and this is more of a continuity lapse — during his time along, Keda (Kodi Smit-McPhee) starts to grow some teenage whiskers, yet in the final scene, they are gone. But going by his father's beard, this is not a culture where men shave.

First, Alpha is a beautiful movie to watch. Some of that is Alberta and a lot of it is CGI, I will grant. But wow, Shining Times. If you were an old man by forty, you still would have lived a life filled with wonder.

Second, it's a "dog story" with a happy ending, a bit like the lines from Kipling's Jungle Book:

When the Man waked up he said,
'What is Wild Dog doing here?'
And the Woman said,
'His name is not Wild Dog any more,
but the First Friend,
because he will be our friend
for always and always and always.'

August 31, 2018

I feel like I have been somewhere, that is for sure. I was on-deadline the second half of August, and while the grass grew and the dog's walks were a little shorter than they should have been, I bashed out the 8,000 words required. But I missed blogging.

Now I am at a Secret Location in far-northern New Mexico, clearing out my emails. It's nice when Secret Locations have decent wifi.

Meanwhile: here are a few things of interest.

• How they used to burn the prairies. Not just the prairies. As I ride Amtrak through the Midwest, I often mentally conjure a dry, breezy day and a line of people with drip torches. (Link goes to video.) I mean, there used to be buffalo in Kentucky.

The photo on the banner of this blog was taken at the Wolf Springs Ranch in northwest Huerfano County.

From the Wet Mountain Tribune:

The acquisition extends the Nation’s presence in the county by another
12,505 acres for an approximate total of 28,855 acres straddling both
Huerfano and Custer counties. The land is significant for the Navajo, as
it is near the sacred mountain Tsisnaasjini’, also known as Blanca Peak.

In announcing the purchase, Navajo Nation President Russell Begaye said ,
“It is a blessing for the Navajo Nation to once again have land in the
state of Colorado. When land was being designated by the federal
government they refused to include Colorado as part of Navajo. We now
own more of our ancestral land with the purchase of Boyer Ranch. It is a
beautiful place surrounded by mountain ranges in the shadows of
Tsisnaasjini’.

He went on to speak about the economic opportunities the new addition
brings to the Nation: “This is a place where we can develop the Navajo
Beef program and eventually provide more opportunities for our ranchers.
There is a good market for quality beef in restaurants and grocery
stores and Navajo can meet that demand.”

The Nation’s portion of the
Wolf Springs Ranch includes about 400 head of cattle, and over 900 head
of bison.

The importance of the Boyer Ranch to the Nation goes beyond ranching
however, as the ranch has early priority water rights, and the gravel
pit there could be used to develop Nation infrastructure.
Vice President Jonathan Nez also sees the potential to one day develop
an athletic program that takes advantage of the high-altitude of the
land.

“We have some remarkable athletes on the Navajo Nation,” he notes,
“and this would be a great opportunity to train our youth and celebrate
health and wellness. The land there is beautiful and it is not just for
us but also for future generations.”

In other news, restaurant workers in Westcliffe, Silver Cliff, and Walsenburg are learning how to say "Yah-ta-hey" with the correct intonation.

Wolf Springs Ranch had been involved in Colorado Parks and Wildlife's "Ranching for Wildlife" program, which is a money-maker for the landowner as well as opening up private land to a limited amount of big-game hunting. I wonder what will happen with that.

"The scientists compared the mitochondrial DNA from the fossil found
at Ch’ijee’s Bluff [Yukon] to that taken from 45 other bison remains, including
one of the oldest and most interesting specimens, the fossil of a giant,
long-horned bison — belonging to the species Bison latifrons — found in Snowmass, Colorado.

“Bison latifrons is an interesting beast,” said Dr. Duane Froese, a geologist with the University of Alberta, in a separate statement.

“Its horns measured more than two meters across at the tips, and it was perhaps 25 percent larger than modern bison.”

October 05, 2013

That buffalo (bison) in the photo banner up top is part of a private herd at the Wolf Springs Ranch in Huerfano County, Colorado. Where he is grazing is historic habitat, but the herd was re-introduced and built up by a wealthy rancher, Tom Redmond.

The European bison, which was extinct in the wild in Europe at the start of
the 20th century, has increased by more than 3,000 per cent after a
large-scale breeding and reintroduction programme. It now has particular
strongholds in Belarus and Poland.

Brown bear numbers have doubled and the grey wolf population of Europe
quadrupled between 1970 and 2005.

There were also sharp rises in numbers of several species of bird, including
the Svalbard breeding population of the barnacle goose, the white-tailed
eagle and the Spanish imperial eagle.

But tell me, did someone at The Telegraph use a stock photo of North American bison? Compare to these.For a moment I wondered if someone was cross-breeding our bison, but I don't think so. The website of the European Bison Conservation Center says, "The [captive breeding] program should ensure separation of the pure Lowland and the
Lowland-Caucasian lines and avoid hybridization with any other related
species."

• Breeding "pure" buffalo at Colorado State University. (I had learned only in the past few years that many American buffalo have some domestic bovine genes.) So when do we get shows and and judges and ribbons and people talking about "the fancy"? Or does that already exist, and I don't know about it, not being friends with Ted Turner?

March 08, 2011

• In my corner of Colorado, my rural DNS service got a grade of D, "slower than 72% of US." (Why we do not watch streaming movies—not at download speeds of 1.29 megabytes/second. Hurray for Qwest "Heavy Duty Internet/Broadband Service.")

November 08, 2010

Alex Wypyszinski, a retired professor and amateur photographer, shot this amazing series of photos of a grizzly bear chasing down an injured bison when he stopped to take photos of geysers in Yellowstone National Park in May.

I have two days to get ready for a short elk hunt*, so I leave you with a series of photos (if you have not already seen them elsewhere) of a grizzly bear's pursuit of an injured bison right down a highway in Yellowstone National Park, courtesy of Field & Stream.

Something that makes these photos even more remarkable is that [Alex] Wypyszinski didn’t use a high-end camera and lens to shoot the series.

“It was just a (digital) point-and-shoot, but it had a 15x zoom lens on it. The professionals are always out there with their 800mm lenses and run around in a group when they hear about something like this…”

As the man (possibly Weegee) said, "f/8 and be there." Today, it's more like "fresh batteries and be there."

February 03, 2006

When I was little, my father was a Forest Service district ranger in the Black Hills. One year his name came up in the drawing for the chance to shoot a buffalo (the term customarily used) in the annual herd cull at Custer State Park. He went, he shot, we ate. It was not a hunt, he emphasized, but more "like shooting a cow in a pasture."

Custer State Park used to be one of very few places to see bison. They were in all the Western movies that required rampaging buffalo.

Now bison are are an industry. (The various local industry groups seem to be split on whether they are "bison" or "buffalo".)

Every industry has a trade group and a spokesman, and this one says, "As we continue to rebuild the herds out there and to bring the species back from a point where it was on the brink of extinction 120 years ago, it really requires that it end up on the dinner plate, for the ranchers to have the incentive to bring the animals back."

Some Indian tribes have started their own herds, while buffalo-hunting now joins salmon-fishing in the treaty rights arena.

One bison (that word still seems artificial to me) rancher in this county cited their advantages over cattle: low-cholesteral meat, hardiness and ease of care, and, not inconsequential, the additional dollar value of the hide and the skull, as long as people want to hang the last on their walls for that Old West look.

Someone snapped Dad's photo: hunter, rifle, deceased Bison bison. Forty years later, he was still complaining about the fact that he was wearing a necktie in the picture, because he had come straight from a visit to the forest supervisor's office in Custer, S.D.--the only times that he wore his full uniform.

April 07, 2005

The "Buffalo Commons" idea put forth in the 1980s lives on: a lightly populated area of the High Plains whose economy, at least partly, would revolve around bison.

The Buffalo Commons will be a restored and reconnected area from Mexico to Canada, where we humans learn to work together across borders that were artificial in the first place. The Buffalo Commons means the day when the fences come down. The buffalo will migrate freely across a restored sea of grass, like wild salmon flow from the rivers to the oceans and back. Settled areas can --like they do in Kenya-- fence the animals out, not fence them in.

November 27, 2004

The idea that prehistoric hunters, wielding the big spear points associated with Folsom Man, etc., killed all much of the North American megafauna (mammoths, giant ground sloths, etc.) has become almost "gospel." Likewise, these hunters are accused of killing off the former giant bison and/or forcing them into dwarfism--yes, the bison or American buffalo we know now would be the "dwarf."

On that larger topic of "missing" animals, Connie Barlow's Ghosts of Evolution is an excellent read. After reading it last year, I can never look at an avocado or the common roadside "coyote gourd" the same away again.